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All of the above proposals are realities in Western Europe, and it is suggested that the adoption of such “reforms” would substantially reduce the transaction costs of providing compensation to deserving plaintiffs, improve the efficiency of the tort system, and provide manufacturers and service providers with greater predictability and “fairness” in potential tort damages in the United States.

In the common law of the United ¹Kingdom the objective of any award of damages in personal injuries litigation is to achieve as nearly as possible full compensation for the claimant in respect of the injury sustained.² To achieve that objective the court seeks to award such sum as is notionally required to be laid out in the purchase of an annuity which will provide an annual amount equivalent to the loss for the whole period of the loss.³ The basis of the calculation is an assumed annuity. The court makes an assumption about how the award will be invested.⁴ Lord Fraser of Tullybelton in Cookson v. Knowles ⁵ put it thus:The assumed annuity will be made up partly of income on the principal sum awarded, and partly of capital obtained by gradual encroachment of the principal. The income element will be at its largest at the beginning of the period and will tend to decline, while the capital element will tend to increase until the principal is exhausted.The court is not, in fact, concerned with how the award will be spent:How the Plaintiffs will in fact invest their damages is, of course, irrelevant. That is a question for them. It cannot affect the calculation.⁶

The theory of the monetary circuit, as developed in its most powerful form by Graziani (1989), has made a significant contribution to the analysis of credit money in Marxian economics. A key issue is the extent to which circuit theory fails to take into account the relationship between sectors producing capital and consumption goods. In Marx’s reproduction schema, how much money do capitalists need to advance in order for exchange between sectors to balance, and for the circuit to be closed? The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by examining different models of the monetary circuit, each of which has a textual grounding in Marx’s often contradictory musings in Capital, Volume 2.

Alongside alternative conceptions of the circuit of money, different interpretations exist about the role of the multiplier, which can be nested in Marx’s reproduction schema. The problem, from a Marxian point of view, is that in the existing literature investment is usually confined to the capital goods sector. It can be argued that Marx, for the most part, viewed investment as involving accumulation in both departments of production. Using a multiplier framework, derived from input-output technology, this wider treatment of investment is considered as an alternative way of modelling the circulation of money. In addition to contributing to Marxian analysis of the money circuit, this approach could also be more accessible to a wider Post Keynesian audience, since a scalar Keynesian multiplier is employed.

The chapter contains a methodology for formalized evaluation of the public fiscal policy from the view point of its impact on the financial stability of a national economy using the example of the Russian Federation and taking into account the fiscal multipliers’ effects. The significance of this problem is predetermined by recent trends in Russia’s development, when the national economy legs twice behind the world indicators. Taking into account the importance of the Russian budget system as a mechanism for the redistribution of gross domestic product (GDP), the financial stability safeguarding has been connected with the public finance sustainability and with the federal budget revenues and expenditures equilibrium. There are used the methodology of analysis of economic systems’ dynamic factors of financial stability as well as fiscal multipliers’ effects, aiming at managing national economy’s long-term development with the ultimate purpose to maintain the GDP growth rates. Taking into account the fiscal multipliers’ values, the model comparisons of the macroeconomics and budget parameters’ dynamics prove the necessity of the budget consolidation policy in 2018–2020 provided that the budget expenditures efficiency increases. The latter has been proved by modeling dependences represented by the fiscal multipliers’ effects in terms of national financial stability.

This chapter is devoted to fiscal policy theory and to how its evolution influenced the policy principles implemented from the end of the World War II to the present. It shows how the theoretical foundations evolved, from the Keynesian theory according to which public expenditure was conceived as an instrument to sustain aggregate demand and achieve full employment, to the present theoretical framework in which, following the intertemporal approach, it has been downgraded to an external shock. The public debt issue is examined with the aim of explaining why sound public finance represents a primary policy objective in the Eurozone.

Soon after the Lehman crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) surprised its critics with a reconsideration of its research and advice on fiscal policy. The paper traces the influence that the Fund’s senior management and research elite has had on the recalibration of the IMF’s doctrine on fiscal policy. The findings suggest that overall there has been some selective incorporation of unorthodox ideas in the Fund’s fiscal doctrine, while the strong thesis that austerity has expansionary effects has been rejected. Indeed, the Fund’s new orthodoxy is concerned with the recessionary effects of fiscal consolidation and, more recently, endorses calls for a more progressive adjustment of the costs of fiscal sustainability. These changes notwithstanding, the IMF’s adaptive incremental transformation on fiscal policy issues falls short of a paradigm shift and is best conceived of as an important recalibration of the precrisis status quo.

According to Clark (1935a, b), if the various studies on the secondary effects of public works expenditures are examined, two main approaches to the analysis of the problem are revealed: “one via successive cycles of income and spending by ultimate recipients of income” – which the Columbia economist termed the “Kahn-Keynes” approach – “the other via the volume of money and its velocity of circulation.” As is well known, in the first approach, business fluctuations are seen primarily as a consequence of fluctuations in current investment. Accordingly, the amount of the secondary effects is determined by: (a) the amount of the net increase in investment; (b) the marginal propensity to consume; and (c) the length of the income propagation period. As it appears from the above, in the “Kahn-Keynes” analysis of the secondary expansion, money plays only a passive role.

Terrorists’ threats pose a grave danger to the health care environment in which we live. In the following paper, we look at how bioterrorist plots can effect a given population and show ways to dissect terrorist actions. We look at variables that use various cause and effect relationships, and lead the reader down a path of being able to use information presented in a real life or fictitious bioterrorist attacks. We seek to inform the reader reasons why preparedness is essential in dealing with the likelihood of the following scenarios.

This paper analyzes the two main divergent interpretations of Federal Reserve monetary policy in the 1920s, the expansionary view described by Rothbard (2008a [1963]) and earlier “Austrian” writers, and the contractionary view most notably held by Friedman and Schwartz (1993 [1963]) and later monetary historians. This paper argues in line with the former that the Federal Reserve engaged in expansionary monetary policy during the 1920s, as opposed to the gold sterilization view of the latter. The main rationale for this argument is that the increase in the money supply was driven by the increase in the money multiplier and total bank reserves, both of which were caused primarily by Fed policy (i.e., a decrease in reserve requirements and an increase in controlled reserves, respectively). Showing that this expansion did in fact occur provides the first step in supporting an Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) interpretation of the 1920s, namely that the Federal Reserve created a credit fueled boom that led to the Great Depression, although this is not pursued in the paper.